Anyone could generate them, for free, and they came with analytics on the side. Google also generated them for sharing content from their services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_URL_Shortener

I’d assume that Google’s value – as with other link-shortening companies – came from being able to add information tracking whenever someone clicked on that link.

If you mean customer value, might be formats where people had limited space to include links like traditional Twitter (which was originally 140 characters in a post, whereas URLs have no specification-mandated character limit).